Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden - Vera Schwarcz Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture

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the evening moon,

      With sad thoughts, he stands on cold bulrush.

      Beneath jasper clouds, moving and stopping restlessly,

      To him the spirit of the white egret is coarse.

      All day long without the companionship of a flock,

      By the side of the gully he laments his shadow’s solitude.6

      In a more contemporary idiom, Taiwanese painter Chen Ch’i-kuan tried to capture the crane’s movements with a sparse calligraphy brush. Economic, bold strokes are used to lift the huge bird off the ground. Unlike the stiff, bold, nearly livid grus japonesis in the ceiling of the renovated Yi Ran Ting pavilion behind the Sackler Museum, Chen’s masterful scroll is a visual pathway through timelessness. Chen’s crane is nothing but bone, sinew, and ink. What was once an elongated leg becomes an arched head poised for cutting air. The cumbersome, earth-bound body has given way to largely empty space in which the painter allows himself a few bold scratches of the brush, as the crane soars, “its body and wings disappearing above the leaves with only dangling legs in the album. As the great bird glides, it fills three double-leaves! There is limitless imagination and joy in these powerful forms.”7

      To bring the Singing Crane Garden to life requires a similar effort. I was fortunate to savor this possibility on May 10, 1998, when I walked the periphery of the old Ming He Yuan in the company of two scholars, Jiao Xiong and Yue Shenyang. Educated men scorched by China’s recent history, they opened for me vistas for reflection about gardens, cranes, historical tragedy, and much else along the way.

      If You Love Pure Shadows

      When we started our stroll on that windy spring morning, I had no way of knowing what winged moments of apprehension were to come upon us. I was prepared for scholarly conversation, not for the wordless understanding that ruined gardens such as the Singing Crane Garden demand, and foster. My two companions were polite, initially reserved. The older gentleman, Jiao Xiong, was a descendant of gardeners who once worked in the imperial Summer Palace. The younger man, Yue Shengyang, was a historical geographer who received his doctorate in Japan. I knew that Mr. Jiao was a well-known researcher about the history of princely gardens in northwest Beijing. I had seen some of his artful evocation of their landscapes in ink and brush. Dr. Yue arrived for our stroll with a gift: a map of the ruins of Ming He Yuan currently visible on the campus of Beijing University (figure 10). This careful drawing was faithful to the lay of the land and even evoked its former beauty by the nearly uninterrupted flow of water that Yue Shenyang conveyed in artful blue.

      Following this map, we started out in the back of the Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology, a site whose history I knew better than my companions. I had spent the previous year in interviews about Arthur Sackler and his complex connection to Beijing University. I shared this history to set my companions at ease, to signal that I understood the darker past of the Cultural Revolution, that I was familiar with the “ox pens” buried beneath these grounds. My goal was to invite them to share their own ruminations, if they so chose. Along the walk, they did.

      Our first stop was a partly submerged rock platform. Yue Shengyang identified this as a piece of a moon viewing the terrace from the Ming He Yuan. Crossing a small alley we came to Red Lake (Hong Chi), a pool renamed to draw attention to Beida’s love of Chairman Mao. On the shores of Red Lake we came upon the remains of a moon gate from the nineteenth century. No afternoon light graced its empty, brittle wooden frame. The spaciousness of reflection that had been available to Oswald Siren in war-torn China had been erased from this corner of the Beijing University campus.

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      Once past this gate, we proceeded to a little island, which may have been one of the artificial features designed by Mianyu. It was on a hill near a weed-choked pond that Yue Shengyang whispered something about the forgotten history beneath this ground: “This was a preferred spot for committing suicide during the Cultural Revolution. If you tried to drown yourself in the larger, more famous ‘Unnamed Lake’ (Wei Ming Hu), the Red Guards would fish you right out. You would face additional beatings for having succumbed to anti-revolutionary pessimism. Here, at least no one found you. Here you could die in peace.”8

      When we reached site 14 on the map, marked simply as “building,” Dr. Yue revealed that this had been the home of his own parents, graduates of Yenching University, who were sorely persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. As distinguished faculty members, they had been given a gracious, one-story compound in the 1950s. By 1998, however, the Yue home had become a cluttered jungle of small rooms used by Beijing University’s manual laborers. Here, Yue Shengyang began to share some memories of his teenage years when he had watched his mother being dragged to the nearby “ox pens” by Red Guards. It had been the young boy’s painful duty to visit his incarcerated mother whenever possible. He was allowed to bring her a few necessities once in a great while. The grown man now recalled the humiliation, the swallowed rage. The Red Guards who tortured Yue Shengyang’s mother used the courtyard of Democracy Hall to spread their dogmatic faith in Maoism. This place is not marked on Dr. Yue’s map of ruins from the Ming He Yuan. It is inscribed in another, more durable fabric: that of historical memory. No sign appears on the Beida campus today to link Democracy Hall to the imprisonment of professors like Zhu Guanqian and Ji Xianlin. The building, used for the administrative offices of Beijing University, stands mute, almost innocent: a large, red building across the courtyard from the Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology.

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      It was a relief to turn our attention to the nearby site marked “small courtyard” (site 12), which housed more gracious remains from the nineteenth century. The past stood waiting here for us on that May day in the form of a worn wooden gate, topped with artfully carved lattice work and two marble pedestals. These were clearly Qing dynasty fragments—“used to dismount from horses,” Jiao Xiong explains. Marked as “residence number 79” (figure 11), this gate was a side entrance to the Singing Crane Garden. My companions take pleasure in identifying this concrete link to our subject and strain to read the faded couplet still visible on the cracked, reddish boards. Where we might have expected traces of Maoist slogans, we read instead: le tian zhi ming, an tu jiao ren (Rejoicing in heaven, know fate. At peace with earth, impart humanness). The beautiful rhythms of classical Chinese soothe us, even as Yue Shengyang recalls that this courtyard was once the home of Yang Falu, an expert in ancient cultural studies, who also suffered greatly during the Cultural Revolution.

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      The end of our stroll takes us to site 16 on Yue Shengyang’s map, the place that marks the main gate of the Singing Crane Garden. As I look up from the bluish paper, I stop in shocked recognition. This is residence 75—the home of my old teacher and dear friend, Wang Yao (figure 12). It was in this precise spot that I began my research in March 1979—when I went to visit for the first time China’s most famous literary historian, a man who became my guide and mentor in the study of modern intellectual history. Although I had earned a Ph.D. in Chinese history, it was as if I knew nothing. When I began to study texts

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